The park pass: Peopling and civilizing a new old Beijing

Public Culture

Volumn 21, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 551-576

  Farquhar, Judith ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77449108174     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: 15278018     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2009-008     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. This discussion centers on parks in central Beijing and is based on field research in Beihai Park, Coal Hill Park, and Purple Bamboo Park and around the Houhai and Xihai lakes. Suburban parks such as the Summer Palace, the Yuanming Yuan, and Fragrant Hills Park are also important to city dwellers.
2. Pankaj Mishra, "Getting Rich: Pankaj Mishra Reports from Shanghai," London Review of Books, November 30, 2006, 3, 5 - 7
3. Park users often give enjoyment (zhaole) and happiness (kuaile) as reasons for their exercise and self-cultivation routines. This observation opens a large issue explored more fully in a book I am writing with Qicheng Zhang.
4. Kang Liu, Globalization and Cultural Trends in China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 86 - 94
5. Observations and quotations from interviews and conversations in this article are drawn from a research project on "life-nurturing" practices in modern Beijing. Qicheng Zhang of the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine is coinvestigator in this project. In 2003 we and a small group of graduate students performed a survey of two hundred residents of Beijing's West City District, then conducted thirty-six intensive interviews with a selection of those surveyed. Special thanks are due to Qiu Hao, Luo Hao, Wang Minghao, Yu Hong, and Lai Lili.
6. Nancy Chen, Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)
7. David A. Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
8. A 1993 film directed by Ning Ying, For Fun (Zhao Le), provides an analysis of the micropolitics of space and place in contemporary Beijing that is quite parallel to that developed in this article
9. Michael Dutton, Policing Chinese Politics: A History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).
10. This article originated in a 2006 American Anthropological Association panel organized in tribute to Nancy Munn. The influence of Munn's recent work on the history of Manhattan and Central Park, her concern with spatiotemporalization, and her respect for the powers of objects all inform my argument here. See Munn, The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992)
11. Munn, "The 'Becoming-Past' of Places: Spacetime and Memory in Nineteenth-Century, Pre - Civil War New York," Finnish Journal of Anthropology 29 (2004): 2 - 19
12. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (New York: Blackwell, 1985), 1 - 13
13. On the politics of space see, e.g., the articles in Jonathan Boyarin, ed., Remapping Memory: The Politics of Timespace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
14. For struggles over space in China, see Stephan Feuchtwang, ed., Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation, and Local Responses in China (London: UCL Press, 2004)
15. Duanfang Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity, and Space, 1949 - 2005 (New York: Routledge, 2006)
16. Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China's Floating Population (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001).
17. Wang Hui is the most globally visible Chinese scholar to take up the theme of depoliticization in China's reform period (1978 to the present)
18. See Wang, "Depoliticized Politics, from East to West," New Left Review, no. 41 (2006): 29 - 45.
19. On leisure activities as "moral regulation," see Paul E. Festa, "Mahjong Politics in Contemporary China: Civility, Chineseness, and Mass Culture," positions: east asia cultures critique 14 (2006): 7 - 35.
20. Alessandro Russo, "How to Translate 'Cultural Revolution,' " Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7 (2006): 673 - 82
21. Wang, "Depoliticized Politics."
22. Wang, "Depoliticized Politics," 45
23. Jürgen Habermas, "New Social Movements," Telos 49 (1981): 33
24. Habermas, "New Social Movements," 36 - 37
25. Dutton translates this first passage of Mao's first officially published essay as "Who are our enemies, who are our friends? That is the question germane to the revolution" (Policing, 3). But the statement is stronger than his translation acknowledges. 18. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
26. Dutton, Policing, viii
27. Judith Farquhar, Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-socialist China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002)
28. Li Hsiao-t'i, "Making a Name and a Culture for the Masses in Modern China," positions: east asia cultures critique 9 (2001): 29 - 68
29. Liu, Globalization
30. Meng Yue, "Female Images and National Myth," in Gender Politics in Modern China, ed. Tani Barlow (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 118 - 36
31. Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000)
32. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Xinyong Liu, "Student Associations and Mass Movements," in Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Community and Autonomy in Post-Mao China, ed. Deborah S. Davis, Richard Kraus, Barry Naughton, and Elizabeth J. Perry (New York: Cambridge University Press/Woodrow Wilson Center, 1995), 362 - 93
33. Xudong Zhang, ed., Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).
34. Li, "Making a Name."
35. Benjamin Lee, "Going Public," Public Culture 5 (1993): 165 - 78
36. In 2008 the admissions fees for many city parks were canceled to facilitate tourist use of the parks during the Olympics period. The park pass remained useful for some of the biggest and most popular parks (Temple of Heaven, for example), and admissions fees have been reinstated for tourist parks now that the Olympics are over.
37. A number of scholars writing about Beijing and other Chinese cities note a state-led emphasis on wenming. See Ann Anagnost, National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), esp. chap. 3.
38. Dutton places wenming discourses in relation to deliberate efforts to depoliticize the antispiritual pollution campaigns of the early 1980s (Policing, 252 - 53)
39. A collection of essays published in China both advances and historicizes wenming campaigns in relation to urban popular culture: Social Culture Department of the Ministry of Culture and China Mass Culture Society, eds., Lun chengshi qunzhong wenhua (On Urban Mass Culture) (Beijing: Zhongguo Wuzi Chubanshe, 1998).
40. Derek Sheridan, "The Future Is Past: Building the Historical City in Beijing" (BA thesis, University of Chicago, 2007)
41. On the changing legal and enforcement regimes affecting housing in Beijing, see Zhang, Strangers in the City; and Sian Victoria Liu, "In the Wake of Workers: Civil Society and the Moral Economy of Marketization at a Beijing Neighborhood" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2004).
42. See the online journal China Heritage Quarterly, no. 12 (2007), www.chinaheritagequarterly.org, for a series of articles by Bruce Doar and Geremie R. Barmé about princely and official residences in inner-city Beijing.
43. Kelly Layton, "Qianmen, Gateway to a Beijing Heritage," China Heritage Quarterly, no. 12 (2007), www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/editorial.php?issue=012.
44. Indeed, it is arguable that the widespread and somewhat ironic use of the name Forbidden City (zijincheng) dates from the 1930s, precisely when large parts of the compound were no longer forbidden to the public
45. Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)
46. Wu, Remaking Beijing, 12
47. On the realist claims of photographs, see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
48. Continuing public campaigns for a wenming city life and the widespread official and popular concern with population suzhi relate closely to the civilizing practices I discuss here. On both issues see Anagnost, National Past-Times; and Terry Woronov, "Transforming the Future: 'Quality' Children and the Chinese Nation" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2003). See also Social Culture Department, Lun chengshi.
49. In a similar vein, conversations with choral singers in several parks sometimes revealed an exclusivist class consciousness. Some retirees pointed out to me that all the singers were retirees, not laid-off workers (though this was not true). And one laid-off worker who sang expressed anxiety that her companions in this hobby did not fully welcome her.
50. In a recent discussion of Mao's philosophical works, Slavoj Žižek has thrown interesting light on the untenable logic of crisis and continuing revolution in Maoism; his analysis is suggestive despite his misapprehension of certain features of Chinese history ("Introduction: Mao Tse-tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule," in On Practice and Contradiction [New York: Verso, 2007], 1 - 28)